In 2014, a stalwart of the WarCraft III community passed away. SySShark, by any account, was the heart of a top American community forum called WCReplays.com, which dedicated itself to the coverage and community of the WarCraft III international scene . The game lost steam after the release of StarCraft II; the forums now are smaller than they once were. But the servers and forums are still robust with activity from people across the world. Even people who had not posted in years came back to this thread in order to offer their memories and regret for his passing. 

I was one of those players. From 2003 to 2009 the forums for WarCraft had been a significant portion of my social time. At the time, my mom worried that I was developing an addiction to video games. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it back then, but it was really the people–some of which I still see on Facebook–that drew me back. After all, it is extraordinarily addictive when you find people with whom you like spending time.

It was these communal experiences on games–Runescape, and Gunbound before WarCraft–that deeply influenced my own personal growth and formation as a social being. Mediating myself online since has always felt more intimate and full than it does offline. And to that extent, I became immeasurably curious about communities that had existed far beyond the purview of American culture.

And yet, it was examining the material limits game worlds that drove some of the first works on online communities. Synthetic Worlds was recognized as an immediate classic of the emergent Game Studies field upon its publication in 2004. Castronova refused to separate the online and offline economies; he instead elided them by emphasizing the economic productivity of the labor both sides produced. This emphasis was likely a result of his own position as a serious economist, interested in the “hard economic, political, and security-related questions that synthetic worlds bring up.” Castronova was bound by his relationship to games–a leisurely indulgence of his youth–and the commitment that games had only become topics of interest when he realized that currency was being exchanged; he translated the significance of this exchange by emphasizing that if Norrath–a region on the EverQuest server–was a country, its Gross National Produced would have been on par with Bulgaria and four times higher than that of China.  

Legitimizing the study of the web was necessary for groups of academics who, in 2004, had no personal reason to care about it. This was partially generational; Castronova came to study synthetic worlds because he had experienced the Golden Age of Arcade Games. The generation of students now likely grew up with their own friends on forums, games, and fanfiction sites. For many of us, the force of the question needs no legitimation; it simply exists. However, the generational shift is less significant than the ways that we have been taught to think and write about communities, a category that has come to encompass everything from nations to families.

The need to legitimize the field via studies of economic productivity, however, has limited its potential to theorizing about such communities in a typical fashion. Castronova, for example, was content to render a theory about government as transcendent to the contingencies of politics or history. While the rejection of democracy on MMORPGs might give certain theorists pause, Castronova powers through to explain that, actually, the anarchy of EverQuest is akin to the writing of English political theorist Thomas Hobbes. When PvP modes were introduced on MMORPGs, they brought out sadistic behaviors of slaughter and massacre wherever players could get away with it. Because this happened to coincide with a lack of government, Castronova was comfortable aligning correlation with causation in the case of this synthetic world.

The move towards Hobbes and democracy as the immediate categories of analysis is familiar. When Europeans began writing history from primary sources, they naturalized their own behaviors, their societies, their ideologies, and wrote about other forms of life as alien or backwards by comparison. It was this project of naturalization that historian Dipesh Chakrabarty called “political modernity,” in his book Provincializing Europe. Political modernity is the type of thinking that assume concepts like “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, democracy, scientific rationality” and so forth are marks of enlightened and liberal states. In the context of his work, Chakrabarty addressed his theory to historians who were educated in this intellectual tradition, and studied non-European regions. Hence, to provincialize Europe was to ask why and how political modernity was being applied to regions whose history was entirely distinct from the European tradition. Not only was Chakrabarty’s book geared towards the Eurocentric nature of intellectual production, it also was a critique of any writer who aimed to naturalize specific political developments of the Enlightenment. Thus, people who study the Middle Ages have sympathized with the book.

It’s seemed to me for some time now that if we cannot assume the value of such analytical categories is intrinsic to communities in the medieval past or the non-European present, we also cannot assume their value in the synthetic future. A digital community like the group of people who gathered to watch and partake in the Twitch Plays Pokémon series, for example, were only bound by their relationship to the Pokémon universe. They came from a range of national traditions, they spoke a number of languages, they had a disparate set of goals, and more than likely an array of beliefs and ideologies. Attempting an analysis of this group that seeks to make a cohesive homogenous entity on the basis of “modernity” would only confuse tendencies of this group with some kind of determinist narrative.

These determinist narratives almost always make some use of political modernity. The main thesis of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone declared a decline in civic participation. This decline was rooted in the lessening of social leisure time, which Putnam attributed to technologies that made isolation preferable. Sherry Turkle in Reclaiming Conversation similarly argues that the act of conversation has been diluted by the introduction of digital devices, which suppress empathy in order to function. Neither author asks a historical question about social capital or empathy, which could provide insight as to whether technological advances were incidental to the narratives they weave, or causal.

Legitimizing technology became dependent on showing that it was part of engaging other people, whether for empathy or social capital. In danah boyd’s It’s Complicated, we receive a narrative of the web’s normalization, and its pragmatic role in either enforcing racial and gendered structures that existed beforehand, or else offering a social space for teenagers in particular to cultivate connection at a time when regimented schedules offer fewer and fewer outlets. Similarly, Whitney Phillips closed her ethnography of trolls by suggesting that the web functions primarily as a mirror; that the distortions and corruptions we view in digital social relations are best addressed through asking questions about the world that enables them to operate.

These scholars had to defend their studies of the web as a relational project; one where the web derives its significance primarily from the social relations that preceded it. However, one way of producing a new theory of society is to ask what social relations exist that are primarily made possible by the web itself. In other words, what does an archive of anonymous online chats look like? How does the exchange on internet forums or Twitter differ from the varying Republics of Letters that existed in the past? What do deeply intimate friendships look like when the individuals who DM each other after a chance occurrence on Weird Facebook? Where do international boundaries come into play? How does the web connect the least suspecting of individuals (à la ISIS and the Lonely American)?

This is a difficult set of parameters to navigate, particularly because I suspect many of these questions are older than most people imagine. But they also represent an opportunity to forge new modes of analysis that privilege the ways that communities are produced not only by the global cosmopolitan elites, but also the majority of people who constitute web users at this point in time. Not only will it be possible, but it will be essential given the porous nature of the web.  

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a doctoral student in history at Brown. He tweets on occasion.